You've mistaken me for someone else. I don't have gigabytes of MP3s that I've hoarded from around the world. I've got maybe 10 or 20, about half of which I intend to delete because I don't like them.
I only download MP3's of songs I'm genuinely interested in purchasing, provided I like them, or for which I've been unable to find the physical media for. For instance, I've recently developed a taste for Devo, and (if I can find them in stores these days), I'll likely be purchasing their work. On top of that, I have several tracks off of the NIN/David Bowie collaboration "The Odd Couple" which I haven't been able to find in stores ANYWHERE. (Where can I get all of the remixes of "I'm Afraid of Americans"? I don't like the MP3s -- I want the CD, but I can't have it becuase nobody is willing to sell it to me because it's not popular enough to carry the overblown price tag they want to put on it.)
More to the point, though, I was NOT trying to justify copyright infringement. Rather, I was trying to point out why things are the way they are (CDs are too expensive and choice is unduly restricted due to an overreaching copyright monopoly and a naturally inflexible demand).
If copyright worked the way it's supposed to work, (namely, limited copyright term) I should be able to purchase Devo CDs from the late 70s from anybody that cares to press them. But, due to the huge term assigned to copyright these days, even my great-grandchildren may not be able to do so. They'll have to rely on whichever company which owns the rights to Devo's music and their own desires for pressing albums. And in the meantime, I'll have to pay the same retail price for Devo albums today that I'd pay for current artists, because that's the way monopolistic pricing works. There's "one price", and if demand is zero at that price, no units ship.
I think a big step forward would be to add an "untended works" clause to copyright, which would put any work which is not actively being commercially exploited for a certain period of time into the public domain. That would make the classic gaming community happy, as well as purveyors of less-than-mainstream works, as many of these works that are currently "lost" due to copyright issues would then fall into the public domain.
Still, the term on copyright is far too long. It should be no longer than about 20 years, tops. Long copyrights deter advancement of the art, and encourage corporate recycling.
Bringing up health-care in a forum that's discussing copyright is a non-sequitor. I personally have health insurance, and I'm young and healthy. So, I naturally don't need to worry as much. Nonetheless, this isn't the discussion for it.
The only reason that CD prices are as high as they are is that that is what the market will bear.
<PREACH target="to_choir">
The prices are that way because, in a sense, they represent monopolistic competitors -- one group's music is not a perfect substitute for another. On top of that, the demand for music is fairly inelastic due to the lack of substitutes, meaning that changes in price don't affect demand much, as demand is relatively fixed.
In other words, because they can, record companies are charging outrageous amounts of money for CDs (and as the "Minimum Advertised Price" issue illustrated, they're using collusive practices to achieve these ends). People can choose to either (a) not listen to the music they desire, or (b) pay through the nose. Demand is inelastic and we end up having only one supplier, and so what happens is that we pay through the nose.
Other solutions such as "listening to the radio" are non-solutions. Radios aren't permitted or aren't effective in many venues (eg. where I work), and certainly don't work on demand. (Play song XYZ now!) Not to mention, many songs are simply never broadcast.
Other distribution channels represent a threat to the current monopolistic state that the record companies are in. The limited monopoly granted by copyright has been transformed into a nearly unlimited monopoly in recent years, and the record companies are fighting tooth and nail to keep that monopoly. I say it just stinks.
And for what reason? Obviously, someone else thought it was worth moderating up. When I posted, it was at a 1, now it's at a 5. What's wrong with that?
Hmm... so how would the analog of alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb work on the Web with the new.alt TLD?
Perhaps in reverse? Such as "die.die.die.patents.stupid.alt"? Nah....
Nonetheless, put me in with a vote for the.alt TLD. As progenitor of alt.drunken.bastards in a late-night hacking session years ago, I understand the need for a well-defined box to hold our anarchy.
[...] The USA - the only country I know off the top of my head still stuck in the days of Imperial units [...]
Uhm, is that why Britain still measures distances between cities and posts speed limits based on miles?
Yes, we spell these words according to American spelling rules -- meter, liter, etc. No harm in that. They're accepted and respected spellings within the US.
Yo, just don't y'all be axin' me 'bout ebonics, ya dig? Dem ain't cool. I'm not down wit dat.
Re:I wrote that code - I'll tell you what it does
on
Mattel Spyware
·
· Score: 2
As was (I thought) pointed out previously, we went to great lengths to only try to talk to the server if there is a currently active connection, by enumerating the active RAS (dialup networking, essentially) connections in the system. If there is no RAS connection, we don't dial.
Yeah, but what if the PC is on a LAN (so that it appears to always have a network link), but the PCs share a single on-demand dialup through a separate box? Before I got a cable modem, that's how our household worked. All of the PCs routed through a single box that used IP-masquerading to route our network's outbound traffic over the single modem. (With 3 or 4 PCs, it's good to not need 3 or 4 phone lines and 3 or 4 modems in order for everyone to have Internet access.) Now, your RAS autodetection fails miserably since it always looks "on".
I believe that's what the original poster was complaining about. I think the main issue is that trying to hide oneself from the user and do things behind their backs is bound to fail eventually and piss someone off. Better to be up front about it, IMHO. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Anyway, thanks for the clear description of what DSSAgent does.:-)
Maybe, or maybe not. It really depends on the bit-rate of the MP3, and the particular perceptual coder used.
You know, not all MP3 coders are made equal. My fiancee has some MP3s that I can't listen to at all because certain pitches have a particular Morse Code-like quality about how they come in and out due to how the perceptual coder thinks I'll hear the music. Sometimes throwing more bits at the problem doesn't solve those issues.
Uhm, if you compress a CD-quality source with a lossy compression format, by definition the copy is not as good as the original. Period.
The more conversions a signal passes through, the lower the quality. The only way a 512K MP3 might even have a hope of sounding better than CD quality is if you encode from a source which is better than CD quality, such as a 24-bit 96kHz/channel digitizer working from the original masters. Not very many people have such a source -- they're ripping from CD.
Now that doesn't mean that lossy compression is bad. As long as what's lost isn't missed, you're ok. And that's the point of having different formats. MP3 is better at choosing what to lose than MP2 is -- it has higher quality at the same bitrate -- just as Vorbis is purportedly better than MP3.
I know I've personally hidden easter eggs in some software I've written. For instance, if you grab my Tetris Clone for Intellivision, it has a Pong clone hidden in it as an easter egg. And, it's all GPL'd.
Also, in one of the programs I maintain at work, I embedded a complete VT-100 Pacman clone that I wrote, although the program I embedded it in does not qualify as open source.
--Joe
PS. Why, oh WHY did Slashdot change my ~ to %7E in my URL?
The people who ported Linux to this box may fully realize that, but they also fully realize that many people outside their small circle will start making all sorts of wacky pronouncements based on this Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed.
It says exactly what the security problem is. So what's the issue? Are you complaining that the grammar isn't perfect? If so, then you're totally off base -- grammar has never been Slashdot's forte.
I know that RS-232 actually has a wider permitted voltage swing. I thought about mentioning that in my post, but preferred to just leave a link instead. I merely related it back to the mention that the original poster made.
As for EIA vs. RS? Only my really old DECwriter2 accoustic modem refers to RS-232 as EIA-232. The popular name for the standard is RS-232, much like the popular name for the iA32 architecture is x86. Besides, in the time frame that the original poster was talking about, I'm pretty sure it really was still a Recommended Standard.
As for the 4mA - 20mA analog current loop, wow, I hadn't heard about that one. My bad, I guess.
The "A" in "mA" is capitalized. It means "Amperes", and "Ampere" is a proper noun.
First, get it right: RS-232is the +/- 12v serial interface that you mentioned. The current loop standard of which you speak was 20mA, not 4mA. (In fact, the military used to use a 60mA variant.)
Speaking of good standards that persist for a reason, consider VT-100. How long has it been since DEC introduced the first VT-100s? And how many of you are using xterm, dtterm, Eterm, gnome-terminal or one of a half-dozen other programs that implement some flavor or forward-compatible superset of VT-100?
Well, maybe you know this, but you can actually do that in python. "if a: b()" is valid.
Well, at least that much is cool. And yes, I was aware of it, but only recently.
Now if there were only a way to tell vi how to "indent block" and "unindent block" when the language lacks explicit block delimiters, then perhaps I'd be happier about it. (I'm a heavy user of the vi key sequences >% and <% to indent and unindent blocks.)
Or, it could be that people who find the indentation policy objectionable won't stay around long enough to write at least 50 lines of Python.
I personally take pains to indent my code in a consistent manner, but for me, consistent is anything but simplistic. For instance, I might just put a very short block (such as an if statement with a short 'then' clause) all on one line for economy of space. Also, I have very particular ways of wrapping long lines, and of aligning similar elements across many lines. It's all very consistent and clean. It's also possibly somewhat unique to me. At the very least, I need only pay attention to my rules and the rules of whatever team I'm on, and not the language author's.
In other words, I've become very accustomed to the idea that whitespace belongs to the programmer and not the programming language. I'm not ready to relinquish my control over whitespace now that I've moved away from languages (such as BASIC, FORTRAN, etc.) that wanted to control it for themselves.
Note: I have looked over Python's whitespace rules, and I find them mostly reasonable. Still, I object on principle.
You're on the right track, but you're wrong. The concept you're thinking of is the "contrapositive". Given a statement "A implies B", there are three related statements, the inverse ("Not A implies Not B"), the converse ("B implies A"), and the contrapositive ("Not B implies Not A").
The statement "A implies B" is a true statement when A is false, or when A is true and B is also true. It's a false statement when A is true but B is false -- namely, A did not actually imply B. This is best illustrated with a truth table:
ABA->B -------------- FFT FTT TFF TTT
The contrapositive of the original statement is always true when the original statement is true, and is always false when the original statement is false. In other words, a statement and its contrapositive are logically equivalent statements. So, when a given statement is true, you can state with conviction that its contrapositive is true. Likewise, when a given statement is false, you can state with conviction that its contrapositive is also false. The two are equivalent statements.
Consider the truth table for the contrapositive, as compared to the original statement:
ABA->B !B!A!B->!A ----------------------------- FFT TT T FTT FT T TFF TF F TTT FF T
For example, take the statement "If it's raining, the sidewalk must be wet." Here, A is "If it's raining", and B is "the sidewalk must be wet." If we accept this as a true statement, then we can say confidently "If the sidewalk is not wet, then it must not be raining." We cannot say, however, "If it's not raining, the sidewalk is not wet", or "If the sidewalk is wet, it's raining" -- at least, not on the basis of the original statement alone.
In your example, you stated "No white feathers, so not a duck." A == "No white feathers," and B == "not a duck". The contrapositive would be "If it's a duck, it has white feathers." In other words, "All ducks have white feathers" is an equivalent statement to the initial statement "No white feathers, so not a duck."
Thank you for correcting me on these. I looked at both of these, and it appears that GNU distributes Flex, but that the FSF has not been assigned the copyright. It's actually distributed under the BSD license. More importantly, the lexers it generates carry NO restrictions from Flex itself. :-) It appears that ncurses is actually under an MIT style license.
So, I stand corrected! Thanks! It looks like I slacked a little on my research. Oops.
How many of them have given you a condescending smile when you mentioned that you use X-Windows 3.x? In their mind, you're just another person who can't keep up with technology. So is the FSF just trying to one-up MS in their own game by releasing XFree86 4.0? Seems like it to me.
Nice troll! I'll bite. Lessee, where do I start.
First of all, until XFree 4.0 came out, most people didn't give a rodent's sphinter what version number X server you were running. X was X. XFree 4.0 changes that a bit since it does provide a huge boatload of features. But still, I don't think I've ever bothered to talk about what version X server I run with almost anyone else. For most things it just doesn't matter. Which brings me to my next point...
The version numbers for an X server do not compare to the version numbers for Microsoft Windows! It's a bit like comparing a JDK version number to Internet Exporer's version number -- it does Java, right? Wrong. "Microsoft Windows 3.x" vs "Microsoft Windows NT 4.0" is a huge difference, since it refers to the whole OS. The closest thing you could compare to is, perhaps, Linux distribution version numbers, which I do agree are inflated a little.
The FSF doesn't produce XFree86. The XFree86 Project, Inc. does. XFree86 even comes under (and this is important) a non GPL license. The FSF would never do such a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
You've mistaken me for someone else. I don't have gigabytes of MP3s that I've hoarded from around the world. I've got maybe 10 or 20, about half of which I intend to delete because I don't like them.
I only download MP3's of songs I'm genuinely interested in purchasing, provided I like them, or for which I've been unable to find the physical media for. For instance, I've recently developed a taste for Devo, and (if I can find them in stores these days), I'll likely be purchasing their work. On top of that, I have several tracks off of the NIN/David Bowie collaboration "The Odd Couple" which I haven't been able to find in stores ANYWHERE. (Where can I get all of the remixes of "I'm Afraid of Americans"? I don't like the MP3s -- I want the CD, but I can't have it becuase nobody is willing to sell it to me because it's not popular enough to carry the overblown price tag they want to put on it.)
More to the point, though, I was NOT trying to justify copyright infringement. Rather, I was trying to point out why things are the way they are (CDs are too expensive and choice is unduly restricted due to an overreaching copyright monopoly and a naturally inflexible demand).
If copyright worked the way it's supposed to work, (namely, limited copyright term) I should be able to purchase Devo CDs from the late 70s from anybody that cares to press them. But, due to the huge term assigned to copyright these days, even my great-grandchildren may not be able to do so. They'll have to rely on whichever company which owns the rights to Devo's music and their own desires for pressing albums. And in the meantime, I'll have to pay the same retail price for Devo albums today that I'd pay for current artists, because that's the way monopolistic pricing works. There's "one price", and if demand is zero at that price, no units ship.
I think a big step forward would be to add an "untended works" clause to copyright, which would put any work which is not actively being commercially exploited for a certain period of time into the public domain. That would make the classic gaming community happy, as well as purveyors of less-than-mainstream works, as many of these works that are currently "lost" due to copyright issues would then fall into the public domain.
Still, the term on copyright is far too long. It should be no longer than about 20 years, tops. Long copyrights deter advancement of the art, and encourage corporate recycling.
Bringing up health-care in a forum that's discussing copyright is a non-sequitor. I personally have health insurance, and I'm young and healthy. So, I naturally don't need to worry as much. Nonetheless, this isn't the discussion for it.
--Joe--
They say:
<PREACH target="to_choir">
The prices are that way because, in a sense, they represent monopolistic competitors -- one group's music is not a perfect substitute for another. On top of that, the demand for music is fairly inelastic due to the lack of substitutes, meaning that changes in price don't affect demand much, as demand is relatively fixed.
In other words, because they can, record companies are charging outrageous amounts of money for CDs (and as the "Minimum Advertised Price" issue illustrated, they're using collusive practices to achieve these ends). People can choose to either (a) not listen to the music they desire, or (b) pay through the nose. Demand is inelastic and we end up having only one supplier, and so what happens is that we pay through the nose.
Other solutions such as "listening to the radio" are non-solutions. Radios aren't permitted or aren't effective in many venues (eg. where I work), and certainly don't work on demand. (Play song XYZ now!) Not to mention, many songs are simply never broadcast.
Other distribution channels represent a threat to the current monopolistic state that the record companies are in. The limited monopoly granted by copyright has been transformed into a nearly unlimited monopoly in recent years, and the record companies are fighting tooth and nail to keep that monopoly. I say it just stinks.
</PREACH> --Joe--
No, he was speaking in Swedish.
--Joe--
And for what reason? Obviously, someone else thought it was worth moderating up. When I posted, it was at a 1, now it's at a 5. What's wrong with that?
--Joe--
Hmm... so how would the analog of alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb work on the Web with the new .alt TLD?
Perhaps in reverse? Such as "die.die.die.patents.stupid.alt"? Nah....
Nonetheless, put me in with a vote for the .alt TLD. As progenitor of alt.drunken.bastards in a late-night hacking session years ago, I understand the need for a well-defined box to hold our anarchy.
--Joe--
Uhm, is that why Britain still measures distances between cities and posts speed limits based on miles?
Yes, we spell these words according to American spelling rules -- meter, liter, etc. No harm in that. They're accepted and respected spellings within the US.
Yo, just don't y'all be axin' me 'bout ebonics, ya dig? Dem ain't cool. I'm not down wit dat.
--Joe--
Someone mod this up!
--
Yeah, but what if the PC is on a LAN (so that it appears to always have a network link), but the PCs share a single on-demand dialup through a separate box? Before I got a cable modem, that's how our household worked. All of the PCs routed through a single box that used IP-masquerading to route our network's outbound traffic over the single modem. (With 3 or 4 PCs, it's good to not need 3 or 4 phone lines and 3 or 4 modems in order for everyone to have Internet access.) Now, your RAS autodetection fails miserably since it always looks "on".
I believe that's what the original poster was complaining about. I think the main issue is that trying to hide oneself from the user and do things behind their backs is bound to fail eventually and piss someone off. Better to be up front about it, IMHO. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Anyway, thanks for the clear description of what DSSAgent does. :-)
--Joe--
Maybe, or maybe not. It really depends on the bit-rate of the MP3, and the particular perceptual coder used.
You know, not all MP3 coders are made equal. My fiancee has some MP3s that I can't listen to at all because certain pitches have a particular Morse Code-like quality about how they come in and out due to how the perceptual coder thinks I'll hear the music. Sometimes throwing more bits at the problem doesn't solve those issues.
--
err.. make that "the 500MHz Celerons are fixed speed, whereas the 600MHz and faster Celerons and Pentium III's are variable speed."
--Joe--
Just to clarify here, I think you meant increase the latency. Alot of people would kill for lower latency even if it meant lower speed. Quake anyone?
--Joe--
They mention that the Celerons are fixed speed, whereas the Pentium III's have SpeedStep technolo....errr... are variable speed CPUs.
Obviously, the less-than-1-watt figure was quoted while running the "Blank" screen saver or something. :-)
--Joe--
Uhm, if you compress a CD-quality source with a lossy compression format, by definition the copy is not as good as the original. Period.
The more conversions a signal passes through, the lower the quality. The only way a 512K MP3 might even have a hope of sounding better than CD quality is if you encode from a source which is better than CD quality, such as a 24-bit 96kHz/channel digitizer working from the original masters. Not very many people have such a source -- they're ripping from CD.
Now that doesn't mean that lossy compression is bad. As long as what's lost isn't missed, you're ok. And that's the point of having different formats. MP3 is better at choosing what to lose than MP2 is -- it has higher quality at the same bitrate -- just as Vorbis is purportedly better than MP3.
--Joe--
I know I've personally hidden easter eggs in some software I've written. For instance, if you grab my Tetris Clone for Intellivision, it has a Pong clone hidden in it as an easter egg. And, it's all GPL'd.
Also, in one of the programs I maintain at work, I embedded a complete VT-100 Pacman clone that I wrote, although the program I embedded it in does not qualify as open source.
--JoePS. Why, oh WHY did Slashdot change my ~ to %7E in my URL?
--
The people who ported Linux to this box may fully realize that, but they also fully realize that many people outside their small circle will start making all sorts of wacky pronouncements based on this Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed.
--Joe--
It says exactly what the security problem is. So what's the issue? Are you complaining that the grammar isn't perfect? If so, then you're totally off base -- grammar has never been Slashdot's forte.
Get over it.
--Joe--
Thanks.
(BTW, also thanks for pointing out the 4mA current loop std that I wasn't aware of. I rather enjoy amassing computer trivia.)
--Joe--
-
-
-
-
--JoeI know that RS-232 actually has a wider permitted voltage swing. I thought about mentioning that in my post, but preferred to just leave a link instead. I merely related it back to the mention that the original poster made.
As for EIA vs. RS? Only my really old DECwriter2 accoustic modem refers to RS-232 as EIA-232. The popular name for the standard is RS-232, much like the popular name for the iA32 architecture is x86. Besides, in the time frame that the original poster was talking about, I'm pretty sure it really was still a Recommended Standard.
As for the 4mA - 20mA analog current loop, wow, I hadn't heard about that one. My bad, I guess.
The "A" in "mA" is capitalized. It means "Amperes", and "Ampere" is a proper noun.
--
First, get it right: RS-232 is the +/- 12v serial interface that you mentioned. The current loop standard of which you speak was 20mA, not 4mA. (In fact, the military used to use a 60mA variant.)
Speaking of good standards that persist for a reason, consider VT-100. How long has it been since DEC introduced the first VT-100s? And how many of you are using xterm, dtterm, Eterm, gnome-terminal or one of a half-dozen other programs that implement some flavor or forward-compatible superset of VT-100?
--Joe--
Well, at least that much is cool. And yes, I was aware of it, but only recently.
Now if there were only a way to tell vi how to "indent block" and "unindent block" when the language lacks explicit block delimiters, then perhaps I'd be happier about it. (I'm a heavy user of the vi key sequences >% and <% to indent and unindent blocks.)
I'll stop careening offtopic now. :-)
--Joe--
Or, it could be that people who find the indentation policy objectionable won't stay around long enough to write at least 50 lines of Python.
I personally take pains to indent my code in a consistent manner, but for me, consistent is anything but simplistic. For instance, I might just put a very short block (such as an if statement with a short 'then' clause) all on one line for economy of space. Also, I have very particular ways of wrapping long lines, and of aligning similar elements across many lines. It's all very consistent and clean. It's also possibly somewhat unique to me. At the very least, I need only pay attention to my rules and the rules of whatever team I'm on, and not the language author's.
In other words, I've become very accustomed to the idea that whitespace belongs to the programmer and not the programming language. I'm not ready to relinquish my control over whitespace now that I've moved away from languages (such as BASIC, FORTRAN, etc.) that wanted to control it for themselves.
Note: I have looked over Python's whitespace rules, and I find them mostly reasonable. Still, I object on principle.
--Joe--
He wasn't completely forgotten. Speaking of scientists working to advance the frontiers of Gamma Ray Research, you forgot to mention another fine pioneer, David Banner.
And, yo, moderators, where ya' gettin' yo $3 crack from?
--Joe--
You're on the right track, but you're wrong. The concept you're thinking of is the "contrapositive". Given a statement "A implies B", there are three related statements, the inverse ("Not A implies Not B"), the converse ("B implies A"), and the contrapositive ("Not B implies Not A").
The statement "A implies B" is a true statement when A is false, or when A is true and B is also true. It's a false statement when A is true but B is false -- namely, A did not actually imply B. This is best illustrated with a truth table:
ABA->B
--------------
FFT
FTT
TFF
TTT
The contrapositive of the original statement is always true when the original statement is true, and is always false when the original statement is false. In other words, a statement and its contrapositive are logically equivalent statements. So, when a given statement is true, you can state with conviction that its contrapositive is true. Likewise, when a given statement is false, you can state with conviction that its contrapositive is also false. The two are equivalent statements.
Consider the truth table for the contrapositive, as compared to the original statement:
ABA->B !B!A!B->!A
-----------------------------
FFT TT T
FTT FT T
TFF TF F
TTT FF T
For example, take the statement "If it's raining, the sidewalk must be wet." Here, A is "If it's raining", and B is "the sidewalk must be wet." If we accept this as a true statement, then we can say confidently "If the sidewalk is not wet, then it must not be raining." We cannot say, however, "If it's not raining, the sidewalk is not wet", or "If the sidewalk is wet, it's raining" -- at least, not on the basis of the original statement alone.
In your example, you stated "No white feathers, so not a duck." A == "No white feathers," and B == "not a duck". The contrapositive would be "If it's a duck, it has white feathers." In other words, "All ducks have white feathers" is an equivalent statement to the initial statement "No white feathers, so not a duck."
Got that?
--Joe--
Thank you for correcting me on these. I looked at both of these, and it appears that GNU distributes Flex, but that the FSF has not been assigned the copyright. It's actually distributed under the BSD license. More importantly, the lexers it generates carry NO restrictions from Flex itself. :-) It appears that ncurses is actually under an MIT style license.
So, I stand corrected! Thanks! It looks like I slacked a little on my research. Oops.
--Joe--
Nice troll! I'll bite. Lessee, where do I start.
Why don't you do a little research occasionally?
--Joe--